This Is Why Your Voice Sounds So Weird On A Recording

Reader Christah wrote into ask, “Why do our voices sound
different to us than they do to other people/on
recordings?”

For many of us, there are few things more painful than hearing a
recording of our own voices. They don’t sound like we think they
should.

They’re tinnier, higher and just not right. The tape (or
mp3) doesn’t lie, though, and the way we think we sound isn’t how
we really sound to everyone else.

This is a cruel trick that happens because of the ways that
sounds can travel to our inner ear.

Every sound we hear — birds chirping, bees buzzing, people
talking, and recordings — is a wave of pressure moving through
the air. Our outer ears “catch” these waves and funnel them into
our head through the ear canal. They strike the ear drum, which
starts vibrating, and those vibrations travel to the inner ear,
where they’re translated into signals that can be sent via to the
auditory nerve to the brain for interpretation.

The inner ear doesn’t get stimulated only by external sound waves
coming down the ear canal, though. It also picks up on vibrations
happening inside the body, and it’s a combination of these two
things that make up the sound you hear when you talk.

When you speak, vibrations from your vocal cords resonate in your
throat and mouth, and some get transmitted and conducted by the
bones in your neck and head. The inner ear responds to these just
like any other vibrations, turning them into electrical signals
and sending them to the brain. Whenever you speak, your inner ear
is stimulated both by internal vibrations in your bones and by
the sound coming out of your mouth and traveling through the air
and into the ears.

This combination of vibrations coming to the inner ear by two
different paths lends your voice as you normally hear it a unique
character that other, “air only” sounds don’t have. In
particular, your bones enhance deeper, lower-frequency vibrations
and give your voice a fuller, bassier quality that’s lacking when
you hear it on a recording.